If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Unigine Pushes Engine Changes; More Mesa Friendly

04-06-2012, 08:30 PM

Phoronix: Unigine Pushes Engine Changes; More Mesa Friendly

Unigine Corp has announced a set of improvements to their cross-platform and visually-stunning Unigine Engine. With the Source Engine on Linux finally looking to be imminent for entering the public spotlight, new improvements to Unigine couldn't come at a better time...

Comment

I wonder how long it will take to nominally "boot up" RadeonSI G3D driver on Unigine, with these enhancements in place?

No doubt it probably runs pretty darn well on Evergreen and Cayman already, but those of us who have transcended VLIW will probably need to wait a while until RadeonSI reaches relative feature parity (or at least OpenGL support parity) with r600g... right?

Can any of the developers working on this shed some light on the road ahead?

Comment

Pleaser, someone should make a FPS with vehicles and multiple objectives on huge maps with this engine.

Well if you want an FPS I'll take one in the vein of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but I'd prefer something more like Metal Gear Solid or an open ended RPG with mod tools and online co-op play, fantasy steam/tesla/clockwork/cyberpunk or straight up sci-fi doesn't matter so long as it's not a grind fest.

Comment

Because their engine is based on a lot of open source tools, and it's the "right thing to do" to give back to open source if you use it.

Because Unigine has targeted Linux as one of their very serious primary platforms (Windows and Mac being the other primary platforms). Sure, not every game developer is going to prioritize desktop Linux like Unigine does, but there's a culture over there that they just plain care about making their games run well on desktop Linux. It's a priority for them, whether or not you can comprehend their reasons.

Since it is a priority for them, and since a large portion of desktop Linux users run the open source graphics drivers (including all users of Intel IGPs and Sandy Bridge or later GPUs), it's beneficial to their goal to make that platform work as well as it can.

Because you can do a lot to improve your game's performance/compatibility on the open drivers by changing your application code, but you can do even more by improving the graphics drivers themselves.

Because people who are OpenGL application programmers are actually very well-suited to being driver programmers. A lot of our current Mesa contributors started out writing OpenGL applications from a "developer-user" perspective; at first they had no interest in writing drivers. But that interest developed naturally out of writing OpenGL applications, and they learned that they could apply the same skills, the same math and the same domain knowledge to drivers as they already accrued learning OpenGL itself.

Yes, it would cost them money to dedicate resources to Mesa, and it might not make short-term monetary sense to throw money at something that won't reap much in the way of returns, but as I said, Unigine is VERY dedicated to desktop Linux as a supported platform; it's not a second-rate tack-on. I'm sure they have very sound reasons for taking this strategy.

Comment

Because their engine is based on a lot of open source tools, and it's the "right thing to do" to give back to open source if you use it.

So, according to your logic, if I use Firefox, it is the "right thing to do" to contribute to PulseAudio, since they're both Open Source. Right?

Originally posted by allquixotic

Because Unigine has targeted Linux as one of their very serious primary platforms (Windows and Mac being the other primary platforms). Sure, not every game developer is going to prioritize desktop Linux like Unigine does, but there's a culture over there that they just plain care about making their games run well on desktop Linux. It's a priority for them, whether or not you can comprehend their reasons.
Since it is a priority for them, and since a large portion of desktop Linux users run the open source graphics drivers (including all users of Intel IGPs and Sandy Bridge or later GPUs), it's beneficial to their goal to make that platform work as well as it can.
Because you can do a lot to improve your game's performance/compatibility on the open drivers by changing your application code, but you can do even more by improving the graphics drivers themselves.

Please explain to me how Linux is a "very serious" primary platform (as opposed to Win/OSX)?
The only reason forum traffic for Linux is so high for them is because 90% of their buyers turned out to be Linux users, who blindly and happily
bought the game simply for the illusion of AAA games coming to Linux. Other platforms.. well, to them it was just what it is,
a poorly executed idea of a tower defence/RTS hybrid.

At first they could just go (as icculus put it once) "binary blobs or GTFO". They clearly stated they had no intentions of supporting any buggy OSS drivers.
But, as ungrateful as the community typically is , they just ignored all that and started obliviously submitting bugs caused by OSS drivers..
seeing that their customers were mostly from Linux, the devs didn't want to make them more angry.

And that's the reason why I personally, should I ever become a game dev, wouldn't even think about Linux.
First you are kind enough to provide Linux support in the first place, and: people are ungrateful and demand support for inferior OSS drivers.
Then you are kind enough to support those drivers, and then folks like you come along and all of a sudden even demand contribution to drivers they never even intended to support.